Tuesday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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If Christopher Columbus Had Listened To The ‘Experts’ We Wouldn’t Have America

Via The Federalist

We can all attribute our first-grade history class success to the little mnemonic diddy that cemented New World history into our developing brains: “In fourteen-hundred-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” This COVID-fraught Columbus Day, maybe we should add a second line that would go a little something like this: “But if the experts had their way, there’d be no America for us today.”

We all know the basic story of Christopher Columbus, the complicated Italian explorer who fell backassward into the discovery of what’s now the Americas on an attempted voyage across the Atlantic to the Orient.

The armchair leftists of the Beltway would have you think only of American Indians on this holiday, which they’ve tried to rename “Indigenous People’s Day.” But there might actually be more applications for our current cultural woes if we focus instead on the expert classes of Columbus’s day — and what the explorer accomplished by ignoring them.

We don’t need to venerate Columbus as a moral role model to recognize the profound ways in which he transformed the world, especially America (insert obligatory caveat about the unforgivable transgressions of historical figures here). And we don’t need to pretend Columbus had it all figured out. He actually had some things pretty wrong, including vastly underestimating the oceanic distance he’d need to cross. And remember how he called the inhabitants of the New World “Indians” because he was a little confused about where he’d beached his boat?

When we think about Columbus this year, however, there’s one part of the story we might highlight and try to emulate, and that’s the explorer’s courage in defying death and his snubbing of the so-called experts who had their facts all wrong.

Most European navigators, the “experts” of Columbus’s age and trade, said a westward voyage from their continent to Asia was impossible and that anyone who tried it would surely die, making the explorer’s attempts at financing nearly impossible. King John II of Portugal and his experts twice rejected Columbus’s appeals for funding. The Spanish savants turned him down too. But despite numerous denials, the courageous and headstrong explorer was undeterred.

After finally securing funding, Columbus made the voyage — landing in the New World accidentally and successfully, in part due to his groundbreaking use of trade winds — despite opposition from the experts and scientists and advisers of his day.

That’s the short version, but an accurate one, and the reason we remember his name and positive contributions on the second Monday of October.

This 2021 iteration, however, finds our North American continent embroiled in a clash between the so-called “experts,” who by coercion and fearmongering attempt to control the working classes, and the headstrong masses, who aren’t convinced the “experts” have it all figured out and who refuse to be strongarmed and intimidated by death.

Today’s so-called experts — of the likes of Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, school boards and teachers unions, and local power-hungry bureaucrats — want you to believe death is lurking right outside your door.

They say government knows best. You must get vaccinated or lose your job. You must keep your face covered whether you’re vaccinated or not. The plummeting economy is no consideration (until it is, and then it’s the fault of the unvaccinated). It’s “too soon to tell” whether you can see your loved ones this Christmas. Church is dangerous, but Met galas and politically favored protests are safe — and might actually slow the spread of the virus. Natural immunity is irrelevant. And we must protect the vaccinated by getting the unvaccinated vaccinated.

If you aren’t buying all that conventional wisdom, you might be losing your job. Or getting your content nuked from Big Tech sites. Or getting dirty looks in the supermarket. Or being forced to mask up in church even though that’s never how worship was supposed to be. Or getting booted from airlines.

Just remember, you aren’t the first one to be balked at by “experts,” and these aren’t the first “experts” to have their facts wrong. But this is America, dammit! And if Columbus hadn’t bucked the experts, we wouldn’t be here today. MORE.

The ‘Shortage Economy’ Will Hit Us Just in Time for Christmas

Via PJ Media

According to economists, we’re at the beginning of a “shortage economy” where shortages of goods like electronics and clothing will become commonplace.

Yes, the pandemic is partly to blame. Factories shut down and are just now revving up to full capacity. The “supply chain bottleneck” has become a fact of life. More than that, there’s almost $10 trillion worth of government stimulus in the West that’s burning holes in people’s pockets.

But there are several other factors affecting the supply of many goods.

The Economist:

Yet the shortage economy is also the product of two deeper forces. First, decarbonisation. The switch from coal to renewable energy has left Europe, and especially Britain, vulnerable to a natural-gas supply panic that at one point this week had sent spot prices up by over 60%. A rising carbon price in the European Union’s emissions-trading scheme has made it hard to switch to other dirty forms of energy. Swathes of China have faced power cuts as some of its provinces scramble to meet strict environmental targets. High prices for shipping and tech components are now triggering increased capital expenditure to expand capacity. But when the world is trying to wean itself off dirty forms of energy, the incentive to make long-lived investments in the fossil-fuel industry is weak.

The second force is protectionism. As our special report explains, trade policy is no longer written with economic efficiency in mind, but in the pursuit of an array of goals, from imposing labour and environmental standards abroad to punishing geopolitical opponents.

Then there’s a problem with container ships. Right now, there are 76 container ships off the coast of Los Angeles desperate to dock and unload their cargo. There are similar problems on the East Coast as well.

The cost of shipping one container from southern China to the west coast of the U.S. is now $20,000. It used to be around $3,000. And even if you can get the ship unloaded, there’s a shortage of truck drivers to clear the docks and ports are running out of storage space to keep them.

Richard Howells, writing for Forbes, says that the uneven opening of the world economy has a lot to do with the supply bottlenecks.

Our global supply chain is struggling to meet the growing demand from markets such as the USA, as seen in the automotive and high tech industries due to the continuing semiconductor shortage. Or how the recent COVID related shutdown of factories in Southeast Asia have impacted the sneaker and furniture industries.

And even when there were products to ship, port closures in Asia have caused a bottleneck of supplies sitting awaiting both containers to package and vessels to carry them.

All these factors have resulted in a steady increase in container ships waiting to enter US ports since July. And with the ports operating at full capacity, the next challenge is both how to transport the goods from the port, and where to store them. For example, there is an estimated 2 billion square feet of warehousing space in Southern California which is already fully utilized.

The pandemic has had unforeseen effects on the economy that we’ll be feeling for years to come. One of those effects will be on the Christmas shopping season. Some big retailers are urging customers to buy early because of the uncertainties that many popular products simply won’t be available in a couple of months. MORE.

China Braces for Possible Large-Scale COVID-19 Outbreak: Leaked CCP Documents

Via Zero Hedge

The Chinese regime has notified local authorities to prepare for a large-scale outbreak of COVID-19, according to leaked internal documents obtained by the Chinese Epoch Times.

One document, titled “Notice of Further Strengthening of Epidemic Prevention” was issued by the Chinese regime’s State Council, and forwarded by Fujian provincial government to local authorities on Sept. 30. The other is a “National Day Epidemic Prevention Notice” issued by the State Council on Oct. 1 and distributed by the Fujian provincial officials to local authorities.

The documents are both marked “extra urgent.”

Both notices request enhanced preparations for an emergency response to the outbreak, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) putting forward at least two standards for local authorities.

One is to build central isolation sites, with local authorities required by the end of October to create facilities of not less than 20 rooms per 10,000 people. The scale of each isolation site must be more than 100 rooms.

According to public data, the population of Fujian Province in 2020 was 41.54 million. As of Sept. 19, the province has set up 35,691 quarantine rooms in 296 central sites.

Based on the standard set in the notice, Fujian Province will need to build at least 83,000 quarantine rooms by the end of October, which is about 47,000 rooms in less than a month.

According to one expert, the requirements for the COVID-19 quarantine sites reveal the real situation of the pandemic in China.

Sean Lin, a former virology researcher at the U.S. Army Research Institute, told The Epoch Times: “This reflects the CCP’s concern about the rise of the epidemic. It must have been concealing the true epidemic in mainland China, otherwise, it would not suddenly issue a national notice of emergency preparedness.”

“Notice of Further Strengthening of Epidemic Prevention” requires the establishment of a five-layered control system.

It states: “Township and street CCP cadres, community grid staff, grassroots medical workers, police, and volunteers shall jointly implement community epidemic prevention,” such as “strictly implement[ing] community prevention and control,” or locking down residential communities.

Lin said that the control system is actually to tighten social management in local areas, and “the CCP’s purpose is to tighten control.”

“If there is no nucleic acid test, all the CCP’s epidemic prevention measures are the same as political campaigns. For example, you can be quarantined at any time and put in a quarantine site. And the quarantine sites can also be a place of political persecution,” Lin said.

“No matter who you are, as long as the CCP says that you tested positive in a nucleic acid test, it will deprive you of all your rights. The CCP’s quarantine sites are actually an alternative form of concentration camp.” MORE.

‘The Perfect Police State’: China’s Digital Dictatorship Goes Global

Via CBN News

In 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping said that “whoever controls data has the upper hand”.

Xi has been on a technological quest to build what some call a blueprint for a digital dictatorship ever since.

It would not only allow China’s communist government to control huge volumes of data on its own citizens but also of those around the world.

Dustin Carmack worked as chief of staff for the Director of National Intelligence.

“You are talking about vast amounts of data they are running between, both either covert or overt cyber-attacks and in other realms, they are sucking up massive amounts of data around the globe that could have nefarious purposes in the long-run,” Carmack, with the DC-based Heritage Foundation, told CBN News.

China has more than 415 million surveillance cameras deployed throughout the country, making its population by far the world’s most-watched.

And now Beijing is using digital currency, social security cards, social credit systems and online interactions to keep an even closer eye on its citizens.

“It is a massive dragnet based on artificial intelligence, facial recognition, voice recognition, these are all novel technologies that the Chinese communist party is deploying against its people,” said Geoffrey Cain.

Cain, the author of the new book, The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, says the regime first tested this type of surveillance several years ago to monitor Uighurs, an ethnic Muslim group living in the western part of the country.

“It’s a place where everything they do from morning to night, from the moment that they eat breakfast or go to the market, or go to work, everything is monitored by their smartphones, by government cameras everywhere, and nothing is private, nothing is secret, your entire life is exposed,” Cain explained to CBN News.

Cain says his investigation found that those reams of data are fed to a massive police database, and with the help of artificial intelligence, attempts to predict whether someone will commit a crime in the future.

“But the thing is that this system has gotten out of control because I looked at a list of reasons that people can be detained for these ‘pre-crimes’ and it could be something as simple as, they bought a tent suddenly or they stopped smoking suddenly, they change their behavior in ways that the system finds odd and so it nudges the police, it sends the police a nudge on the app to go to this person’s house, to their work, check them out, maybe interrogate them a little bit, and if the situation calls for it, take them away to one of the many hundreds of concentration camps,” Cain explained.

China is accused of committing genocide against the Uighurs by holding more than a million of them in what Beijing calls “re-education camps”.

The Associated Press gained exclusive access to one such detention center this summer that allegedly had room enough to hold more than 10,000 prisoners.

“When we talk about genocide, we’re not just talking about taking lives, which there is evidence to suggest that is occurring too, but it is to erase a population, an ethnic group, and that is what they are after,” Tony Perkins with Family Research Council told CBN News.

Experts say President Xi also wants China to be the global leader in exporting its authoritarian surveillance tech to other like-minded regimes.

“When they’ve got the kinds of tools that allow, for example, to track their critics every moment and control their access, for example to money or even to buying plane or train tickets, it can make a state exponentially more powerful,” Sophie Richardson with Human Rights Watch told CBN News. MORE.

Don’t Be Fooled: Lab-Grown Meat Is a Disaster in the Making

Via The Defender

Fake meats aren’t about your health or a healthy environment — they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultra-processed food product that can be controlled by patents.

Lab-grown, or cultured, meat is being promoted as the wave of the future — the “green, sustainable” way to have your meat and eat it too. No animal suffering, no greenhouse gas emissions — just meat-like protein that will taste exactly like the burgers and steaks you’re used to. Sound too good to be true?

Underneath the greenwashed façade, lab-grown meat has been hyped beyond reality and its promises are slated to fall flat. Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s — they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed food product that can be controlled by patents.

Not only is ultraprocessed lab-grown meat not a healthy choice for humans, but its production is plagued with environmental and contamination concerns that are likely to thwart the industry before it ever gets off the ground.

Ironically, the real wave of the future won’t be found via technology but through the return to regenerative farming practices that have been time-tested and valued for ages.

GFI promises fake meat by 2030

In February 2021, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry, released a techno-economic analysis of cultivated meat, which was prepared by consulting firm CE Delft. In it, they developed a model to reduce the current costs of cultured meat production down to a point that would make it economically feasible in full-scale plants by 2030, a model they said is “feasible.”

But as Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat, this would mean lowering “the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years — an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.”

GFI’s report makes it seem as if cultured meat will be readily available on grocery shelves within the next decade, and it’s this type of propaganda they need if they’re going to continue to attract public and private funding.

Proponents are calling on the U.S. government to invest billions in fake meat products, but if they fail — as science suggests they may — it’s taxpayers who suffer. MORE.

Superman comes out as bisexual: DC Comics reveals woke superhero will start a romance with a male best friend 

Via The Daily Mail

Superman is set to come out as bisexual and begin a romantic relationship with his male best friend, DC Comics revealed on Monday – just two months after the company announced that iconic Batman sidekick Robin was dating a man.

The news marks what DC has branded a ‘bold new direction’ for the legendary superhero – a move that began in July, when the company debuted a woke new series of comics about the character, featuring Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s son Jonathan, who inherited the role from his cape-wearing father.

In the months since the Superman: Son of Kal-El series made its debut, 17-year-old Jon has taken on several hot-button issues, including high school shootings, climate change, and the deportation of refugees – all of which are a world away from the sinister supervillains that the Man of Steel once fought.

The character will now take yet another big step to separate himself from the much-loved original Superman storyline by dating his close male friend – with the romance set to take center stage in an upcoming issue of the comic, due to be released on November 9.

However, the same-sex relationship was inspired by the iconic romance between Clark and Lois, with DC revealing that the new Superman’s partner, refugee ‘hacktivist’ Jay Nakamura, is also a reporter – just like the young superhero’s parents.

‘Just like his father before him, Jon Kent has fallen for a reporter,’ the company said in a press release.

The news about Superman’s LGBTQ+ relationship comes just two months after DC Comics announced that another of its legendary characters – Batman sidekick Robin – was also set to come out as bisexual and begin a relationship with a man. MORE.

Experts Predict LGBTQ Acronym Could Circle The Earth 3 Times By 2022

Via The Babylon Bee

U.S.—Researchers working at Portland University’s prestigious School for Inclusion and Justice for 2SLGBTQQIA++ Persons estimate that the acronym for the LGBTQ+ community could wrap around the earth three times by the year 2022.

“At the current rate of expansion, we could see the 2SLGBTQQIAA++ community’s acronym wrap around the equator by sometime later this year,” said the school’s head researcher, Dr. Marvin Frankfurter. “As more and more people join the ranks of the marginalized, invent new identities and genders and pronouns, we are rapidly approaching a situation where the acronym can circle the earth three times by the end of next year.”

“And we think this is a good thing. The more oppressed people there are, the better.”

Dr. Frankfurter warned, however, that Earth may not have enough space to contain the entire acronym, and we will soon have to seek out a new solar system, terraform the planets there, and create a 2SLGBTQQIAA++ alliance to unite all oppressed peoples in the ‘verse, “by force if necessary.”

At publishing time, horrified leftists had suddenly realized the acronym would cover every single person on earth, making the 2SLGBTQQIAA++ community not special at all.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.

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